Introduction

Creative teams today face two fundamental challenges. First, they must manage feedback, approvals, and version control across video, design, and animation assets. Second, they must run structured, repeatable production workflows that keep briefs, tasks, stages, and delivery timelines organized. Filestage focuses on solving the first challenge with streamlined online proofing.

Kreatli solves both mostly focusing on the latter by acting as full-stack production management software.

Both tools serve creative organizations, but they approach the workflow from completely different angles. Understanding that distinction is key to choosing the right solution for your team.

What Filestage Does Best

Filestage is an established online proofing and approval platform. Teams use it to upload assets, share review links, collect timestamped feedback, compare versions, and gather approvals with minimal friction. Its strengths include:

• Simple, client-friendly reviews where stakeholders can comment without an account.

• Frame-accurate video feedback for editors and motion teams.

• Side-by-side version comparison to reduce ambiguity.

• Controlled access and permissions, useful for agencies with external clients.

• Support for a wide range of file formats including video, image, design, and PDF.

Filestage excels when your primary bottleneck is slow or unclear approvals. If the goal is to get stakeholders to review faster and reduce confusion between versions, Filestage delivers immediate value. More detail is available on the Filestage site.

What Kreatli Delivers Instead

Kreatli is a production management platform built specifically for creative teams producing repeated content types: videos, campaigns, animations, social assets, and branded content.

Instead of focusing only on review, Kreatli manages the entire brief-to-delivery lifecycle:

• Project and stage management to orchestrate pre-production, production, edit, delivery, and QA.

• Asset-level versioning inside the project, ensuring files sit within proper context.

• Built-in review pages using proxy playback and timestamped comments tied directly to the asset.

• Approval receipts that become part of the project record.

• Production reporting and auditability to understand delivery risk and improve throughput over time.

For producers, operations leads, and post supervisors, the value is simple: production becomes predictable. Teams move from scattered chats, spreadsheets, and folders toward a system with defined owners, statuses, and approval paths. A deeper breakdown of this approach can be found in the Producer’s Playbook.

Side-by-Side Comparison

When Filestage Is the Better Fit

Choose Filestage when:

• You need only approvals from clients and stakeholders.

• You primarily produce video or creative assets but already manage tasks elsewhere.

• You want reviewers to comment without signing up or learning a new tool.

• You need a lightweight, standalone proofing layer.

Filestage is especially strong for in-house marketing teams, agencies with frequent external feedback cycles, and teams that simply want to reduce review friction.

When Kreatli Is the Better Fit

Choose Kreatli when:

• You need end-to-end production orchestration, not just feedback consolidation.

• You work with complex, multi-stage workflows like pre-pro, shoot, edit, VFX, QC, and delivery.

• Your organization struggles with scope creep, lost approvals, or inconsistent processes.

• You require audit trails, version control, owner visibility, and reporting.

Kreatli replaces generic PM tools and fragmented chat/email-based workflows with a unified system built for producers and creative leads.

When Teams Use Both Tools Together

Some teams pair an online proofing tool with a production platform. For example:

• Filestage handles external stakeholder reviews because it is simple and low-friction.

• Kreatli acts as the system of record, storing who approved what, when, and which version shipped.

In this hybrid scenario, Filestage becomes the “feedback interface,” while Kreatli keeps the full project context and approval history.

However, for most creative organizations aiming to reduce tool fragmentation, consolidating operations inside Kreatli is typically the more scalable long-term approach.

Final Recommendation

Filestage is an excellent choice when your primary concern is accelerating and simplifying feedback cycles. It shines for teams that need a light, client-friendly proofing tool.

Kreatli is the better fit when your organization needs to run production end to end, unify communication, eliminate fragmented tool stacks, and scale recurring work with consistency and control.

If your team is growing, juggling multiple clients, or producing content at scale, a dedicated production management platform will have a far greater long-term impact than a standalone review tool.